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This mosaic image was taken on Jan. 4, 2004, by the navigation camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It shows a 360-degree panoramic view of the rover on the surface of the Red Planet. Spirit operated for more than six years after landing in January 2004, driving 7.73 kilometers (4.8 miles), more than twelve times the goal set by mission planners.

Spirit was the first robot to reach the peak of a hill on another planet. Even after the machine’s right front wheel failed in 2006, Spirit explored another half-mile of Mars’ surface.

Spirit transmitted to Earth more than 124,000 images, ground material from the surface of 15 rocks, and prepared 92 other surfaces for inspection with spectrometers and a microscopic imager.

Spirit’s sister rover, Opportunity, is still active on the surface of Mars. You can see highlights of the Mars Exploration Rovers’ mission at http://mars.nasa.gov/mer10/.

It is difficult to choose the most fantastic space-related photograph of the year. There are, after all, many contenders. We had, for example, many “first-time” pictures of features on the Red Planet, our neighbor Mars. This one shows the west rim of huge Endeavor crater, which has a diameter of about 14 miles. The crater is characterized by geological features that are older than any others Opportunity has investigated during its mission.

Photo courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU

Then there was the first image ever obtained of the huge asteroid known as Vesta. NASA’s Dawn mission is in the midst of an exploration of the asteroid belt. This full view of Vesta was taken from a distance of 5,200 kilometers. The asteroid has a mean diameter of about 530 kilometers and is the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, second in size only to the dwarf planet Ceres.

Photo courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Sticking with the space theme, there are many other amazing images to see, starting with this dramatic one from the MESSENGER probe that shows just a small part of Mercury:

We cannot forget the incredible images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, either. This one, obtained by the telescope in Feb. 2011, shows a nebula (a region of space in which stars are being formed) that is about 2,000 light years away from Earth:

Photo courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

But my favorite picture from 2011 is this one, which was obtained by NASA’s Cassini probe. It shows a storm encircling the huge planet. The storm is the most intense, and the largest, ever observed by Cassini. It produces a significant amount of radio noise, which indicates that there is lightning occurring in Saturn’s atmosphere. One odd feature of storms on Saturn is that they occur when a huge amount of energy is released all at once, which is unlike the meteorological pattern on other planets.